Change the value to this in the Gnome font configurator. Restart X. Sometimes, the videocard gives bogus information to X. It may be better to settle on a value between 72-78 DPI for 1024x768 displays. 96 DPI is a good value for 1280x1024, but it depends on the exact resolution. I actually prefer 75 on my home machine, and the font sizes seem to be a bit more true to their proper sizes when this is set. In most cases, if the numbers don't match, you may use the following method.

You may also opt to force X to start with a forced resolution. This may produce good results in some display modes. For example, you may use:

startx -- -dpi 75

This will force X to start in 75x75 DPI mode. You may change your Gnome font settings (From the menu: Applications/Desktop Preferences/Font) to 75 DPI and you should get a good match.

If this worked well for you, you may edit your "startx" script to always force this option on startup. Edit the file "/usr/bin/startx" as root.

Change the following line:

defaultserverargs=""

to...

defaultserverargs="-dpi 75"

Q. How do I install fonts?

A. An easy way to install fonts is to drop them into your "$HOME/.fonts" directory and running "fc-cache". You can also perform a system-wide font installation by copying the fonts to "/usr/share/fonts" or another font directory (as long as it is listed in your "/etc/fonts/fonts.conf" file), and then performing the "fc-cache" command as root. You may also need to run "ttmkfdir" or "mkfontdir" as well.

Q. The fonts in GNU Emacs are displayed as squares.

A. You need to install the xorg-fonts-75dpi or xorg-fonts-100dpi package.

Q. The fonts in OpenOffice.org look very bad.

A. If we have a bug/font-issue in the openoffice-base package, using the original rpm-packages from the office website will allways work. "Bad fonts are a thing of the past with the newest version (2.3.1)." (http://www.stchman.com/tweaks.html).

Note that OpenOffice.org for Linux ships with an (inferior) copy of freetype2 that are built directly into the code. In the past you could force it to link to your system's, shared, freetype2 by setting the following before starting the suit.

export LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/xorg/modules/fonts/libfreetype.so

The (Jan 2008) above is reported to not work anymore but at qa.openoffice.org a patch to do this bypass is emering.

A. This can be changed in the OpenOffice.org configurator. From the drop-down menu, select "Tools/Options/OpenOffice.org/Fonts". Check the box that says "Apply Replacement Table". Type "Andale Sans UI" in the font box (this may have to be input manually, if it doesn't appear in the drop-down menu) and choose your desired font for the "Replace With" option. Dropline users may prefer the system default, "Trebuchet MS". When selected, click the checkmark box. Then choose the "always" and "screen" options in the box below. Apply the changes, and your menu fonts should look great.

Q. OpenOffice.org doesn't detect my TrueType fonts!

A. Make sure that you add the appropriate entry in your /etc/X11/xorg.conf file that points your programs to the /usr/share/fonts/ directory.